The TRAPPIST-1 system is a treasure trove of possibilities and questions. Observations by JWST have just begun.
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Even with the quantum rules governing the Universe, there are limits to what matter can withstand. Beyond that, black holes are unavoidable.
A massive nuclear fusion experiment just hit a major milestone, potentially putting us a little closer to a future of limitless clean energy.
The nearby, bright star Fomalhaut had the first optically imaged planetary candidate. Using JWST’s eyes, astronomers found so much more.
“Hardcore History” host Dan Carlin recently spoke with Big Think about the history of humanity’s drive to create — and whether or not we can control it.
Known as hypervelocity stars, we originally thought just one would be ejected every 100,000 years. The real number is much greater.
Earth wasn’t created until more than 9 billion years after the Big Bang. In some lucky places, life could have arisen almost right away.
Ancient currents seemed to move in concert with a 2.4 million-year dance between the Red Planet and Earth.
Most stars in the Universe are located in big, massive, Milky Way-like galaxies. But most galaxies aren’t like ours at all.
The odds are slim, but the consequences would be literally world-ending. There really is a chance of a black hole devouring the Earth.
On a cosmic scale, our existence seems insignificant and inconsequential. But from another perspective, humans are completely remarkable.
Many planets will eventually be devoured by their parent star. For the first time, we caught a star in the act, eating its innermost planet!
A Carrington-magnitude event would kill millions, and cause trillions of dollars in damage. Sadly, it isn’t even the worst-case scenario.
The crisis of the Anthropocene challenges our traditional narratives and myths about humanity’s place in the world. Citizen science can help.
In 1054, a core-collapse supernova occurred 6500 light-years away. In 2023, JWST imaged the remnant, and might solve a massive mystery.
Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, finding a bland, featureless world. Now, in 2023, JWST’s sights are similar. There’s a reason for that.
How can you “touch the Sun” if you’ve always been inside the solar corona, yet will never reach the Sun’s photosphere?
In the 20th century, many options abounded as to our cosmic origins. Today, only the Big Bang survives, thanks to this critical evidence.
The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter recently captured images that could help scientists better under the mysterious physics of our Sun.
Rituals come as much from religion as they do from the way Earth spins around the Sun.
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Out beyond Neptune are some fascinating bodies left over from our Solar System’s formation. Could one of them truly be spectacular?
Here in our Solar System, we only have one star: a singlet. For many systems, including the highest-mass ones, that’s anything but the norm.
For thousands of years, we puzzled at how far away the Moon was. Today we know its distance, at any time, to within millimeters.
The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics.
In a distant galaxy, a cosmic dance between two supermassive black holes emits periodic flashes of light.
The stars circle each other every 51 minutes, confirming a decades-old prediction.
You can lead an overconfident chatbot to expert knowledge, but can it actually learn and assimilate new information?
Straddling the bounds of science and religion, Newton wondered who set the planets in motion. Astrophysics reveals the answer.
The nature of civilizational threats has changed in a mere decade.